India Emerging as Consumer Brand Incubator with Global Ambitions

The connected economy is fertile ground for thousands of brands full of promise that don’t yet have the business knowledge, resources and expertise to establish themselves and scale.

In the U.S., companies like Thrasio are building impressive portfolios of such small brands and bringing them to market — often with the intention of selling them off once they’re firmly established.

For India’s massive market, GlobalBees is creating its own portfolio of promising direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands.

With a nod to the Thrasio — which just entered the Indian market — GlobalBees CEO Nitin Agarwal told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster that, “We highly focus on creation of the brand rather than sellers on a particular platform. For us, a holistic approach to creating a brand is very, very important. That’s how we like to think ourselves, that’s what we believe in, and that’s the value proposition that we are after.”

Formed in early 2021 and already sitting on more than $300 million to invest in India’s nascent brands, GlobalBees moved quickly last year, investing in some 15 brands and expecting to add up to 50 in its group by the end of this year, he said.

In a 1-2-3 brand-building process backed by heavy research and development (R&D), Agarwal described how GlobalBees takes good ideas and turns them into products that can scale across India and across borders.

“Our first port of call for a brand is to be able to expand to multiple channels and online … and every channel requires its own expertise and supply chain,” he said. “Our second port of call comes around offline distribution. We are building offline distribution for brands through multi-brand retail trade, general trade, etc.

“Third is international markets. We are already setting up supply chains in various international markets where we see demand for a product.”

These aggressive and well-funded moves are catapulting GlobalBees and its growing assortment of brands into a powerhouse with pipeline for the next three years and beyond.

See also: India’s Unicorns Multiply as ‘House of Brands’ Direct-to-Consumer Concept Takes Wing

In Search of the Scalable Brand

With Agarwal saying the Indian market today is characterized by more than 70% unbranded consumption, growth opportunities in a nation of 1.3 billion consumers is hard to overstate.

Looking for new, winning brands is done by careful analysis.

“How will we sharpen the position or expand the positioning of the product, improve the quality and so on?” he said. “What we want to create is a portfolio of brands from India which can become impactful brands at a global scale.”

To make the cut as a GlobalBees brand, market fit and obvious growth trajectory are other key considerations, he said. The company specializes in “repeatable categories” including beauty, home and general merchandise.

Looking for products with scalable, and even international, appeal is another cornerstone.

“One of the key matrices that we look for as a brand is saying how many people would go and start searching for the brand name rather than the product,” said Agarwal. “When you’re a seller, people search for a product and discover your [store]. When you’re a brand, people search for your brand and then buy it. That’s a big difference.”

Related: D2C eCommerce Platform GlobalBees Notches $150M Series A

Backing Office Backup

While India is still heavily reliant on cash on delivery, it has one of the most rapidly digitizing economies in the world — and companies’ sales strategies are starting to reflect this with growing frequency.

“Most brands today that we’ve invested in would be digital-first, so a large part of their sales would be online,” Agarwal told Webster. “I think there are a couple of brands who would do about 20% to 30% of their sales offline, but that’s literally what we will expand as well.”

To achieve both greater online presence and global scale in some cases, India’s budding young brands need a great deal of high-level help, and GlobalBees intends to be that partner.

“When any entrepreneurs start a brand, they always think about a brand and a positioning that they want to sell, but as they get into the business, 80% of their effort is taken in just running the organization,” he said.

Taking operational burdens off the backs of creative and passionate entrepreneurs frees them to focus on what their consumer wants while the platform does the rest.

“More than just the distribution and marketing efficiency, I think there is a lot of back-end process technology, customer insight and analytics, which is what we see brands lacking,” Agarwal said. “That’s where we bring in a fair bit of value addition.”

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